The year of the strike? Perfect pay storm looms over public sector
New Zealand’s embattled public sector bosses are facing the perfect storm – wrangling big collective agreements while leading a weary workforce, simultaneously under pressure to boost pay packets while being told by the Government to cut costs.
This year is set to be one of the biggest years for bargaining of collective agreements in the public service – thousands are in negotiation – and also in the wider sector in education and health.
It raises the likelihood of strikes and industrial action when a negotiation can’t be reached. In addition, the Public Service Commissioner has warned that the “unaffordability” of many remuneration structures has been brought into sharp relief – namely tenure-based pay progression.
Dear Public Service Union Movement.
The ACT Party are here to choke you out.
If you don’t demand the right to strike, ACT intends to gut and privatise you.
Our refusal to enact ILO Convention 87 on the right to strike, our lack of true leadership inside the Union movement and the failure to do anything other than perk up bureaucrats in Wellington has meant that when a truly right wing government appears with a radical agenda, there is no Union movement left to fight.
We have almost no rights to strike in this country!
No rights for sympathy strikes, no rights for wildcat strikes, no rights at all because we have a Union movement too frightened to actually fight for them.
I agree with the International Centre for Trade Union Rights (ICTUR) and their analysis of our weak union movement:
- Reforms to overturn the legislative undermining of freedom of association and the right to strike
- Amend the right to freedom of association in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 to expressly include the right to collectively bargain and the right to strike in conformity with the law
- Include the right to decent work (including the right to gain one’s living by work which is freely chosen or accepted) in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990
- Include the right to just and favourable conditions of work (as expressed in art 7 of ICESCR) in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990
- Include other economic, social and cultural rights in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990
- Review the role of the courts, and Parliament, in ensuring rights-consistent legislation – remove excessive sanctions from the social welfare system
- Ensure effective implementation of the principle of equal opportunity and treatment in employment, including for Māori workers
- Review immigration policies and regulations to remove barriers to migrant workers seeking assistance and remedies for labour exploitation and other rights abuses
The Union movement is not prepared to fight for the right to strike making their complaints little more than the gasp of the suffocated.
A 10 day nationwide strike would do more for workers than 10 elections ever could.
ACT are here to kill you, you need to fight for the right to strike and then strike dammit!
If you all strike together, the Government will be forced to negotiate and properly fund our public service.
Now is the time to fight back, not capitulate again!
Let’s never, ever forget that it was Labour WITH the support of the NZCTU who passed The Employment Relations Act in 2000 that outlawed most strikes so watching this bite the NZCTU on the arse 25 years later would be hilarious if it weren’t so tragic.
It is time to right that wrong!
Fight for the right to strike!
If the Public Service won’t use their privilege and go on strike, why should anyone else?
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If Wellington bureaucrats went on strike the country would run better.
Sad fact of their own making.
Not really. There are a thousand and one ways anyone’s life can be made hell if they stick their neck out in a Wellington government department , and not necessarily by management either, but by fellow workers focused on their next personal assessments and their KPI’s.
An MSD manager rued to me about staff not speaking up at meetings. I raised this with a senior mentor who couldn’t provide a half-decent sort of answer, and I quit being a PSA delegate when I knew that the other delegates who toadied up to that same management in a shameless self-serving way were out to get me.
The whole structure of New Zealand public service-hood needs to be addressed. There are countries where people compete for places within the public service, and we’re not one of them.
“Unions and strikes are soooo 1970s!’ Yes we must never return to the era of full employment, good housing and decent medical care.
‘No one remembers with fondness the strikes that generally eventuated in nothing much gained for the workers, ‘
Usual misinformation from I’m right.
I remember the 1960s and 1970s well. Around 95 percent of unions never went on strike because they could successfully collectively bargain wages and conditions with employers. Many employers were quite happy with unionised workplaces, compulsory unionism and the award system because it helped them build long-term relationships with workers.
Arbitration was used far more often than strike action.
Remember when people who had jobs did not need foodbanks? That is because union awards gave decent wages and people could afford food and housing.
I’m right I remember the occasion when you said you liked Chinese cuisine.
You really should try Vietnamese food and the dish they named in your honour.
‘Won Dum Phuc.’
Back in 70 and 80 strikes ruined many holidays as they always struck to cause maximum pain. At the end of the day the workers actually gained little as it took some time to make up pay lost . I’m right is correct in saying union officials still got paid while those they represented lost money .
Trevor will strikes be okay with you if they contact you first and find out when you want to go on holiday? I got mad with the ferry workers the Cooks and Stewards Union was it, for going on strike at Christmas and they needed reining in.
But we now find many people who can’t even get a living wage or job and they are very distressed. A little strike now and then would not have left us in our present condition, But the bourgeoisie (middle class, smug) and wealthier think that they are in heaven; not the Christian one, its money from their heaven they desire, not biblical manna for their fellows – go to hell they say and watch. Don’t be like them Trevor, it’s not nice.
Son of 1984! Maybe someone would like to belong to The Left Review inform us, and see all that the great Bruce Jesson had to say. Here is an excerpt.
Bruce Jesson
The Disintegration of a Labour Tradition: New Zealand Politics in the 1980s.
On 27 October 1990, New Zealand’s Labour government suffered one of the heaviest defeats in the country’s electoral history. footnote1 Labour lost twenty-seven of its fifty-six seats, and its share of the vote was the lowest since 1931. It was a humiliating but not inappropriate end for a government that once commanded international respect—on the Left for its anti-nuclear stand, and on the Right for its uncompromising laissez faire policies. What we have experienced in New Zealand is not just the defeat of a party, however, but the disintegration of a tradition. Historically, Labour was the party of the welfare state and the regulated economy. On becoming the government in 1984, it discarded this tradition without warning and became a party of the New Right. In the next six years, Labour almost entirely deregulated the economy. It privatized most of the state’s commercial activities. It reorganized both central and local government along commercial lines. The government ceased to play any role in economic management, with the exception of eliminating inflation, which became its sole economic goal. To this end it operated a high-interest-rate monetary policy.
These policies were not original, but were borrowed from the international literature or copied from Thatcher’s Britain. But the way they were applied in New Zealand was highly distinctive. Not only did we have the case of a Labour Party instituting the policies it had been formed to oppose, but the process of change was more intense and uncompromising than elsewhere. Policies that took years to develop in Britain, such as privatization, were inflicted on New Zealand in a matter of months. Particularly contentious policies—for example, high-interest-rate monetary policy—were pursued pitilessly. New Zealand also serves as a case study of the economic and social damage that can be wrought by monetarism. In its six years in office, Labour set in motion a process of economic disintegration, which in turn undermined the welfare state. It is fitting that in the 1990 election, Labour should itself fall victim to the forces it had unleashed.
Having lost the election, the Labour Party is reverting to its traditional rhetoric, but there is no prospect of it returning to traditional Labour policies. The structure of New Zealand society has changed forever. Both major parties, National and Labour, have the same laissez faire and monetarist policies. The incoming National government is extending these policies into an attack on trade unionism and the welfare state. One of National’s senior ministers, Simon Upton, is the author of a book called The Withering of the State.footnote2
The eighties were a period of rapid and extraordinary change, about which New Zealanders remain bewildered. How did it happen, so suddenly, without warning, and without significant resistance? The flippant answer (but accurate as far as it goes) is that the government was hijacked by a cabal in the Labour Party leadership which had kept its intentions hidden from both party and electorate. The fuller explanation is that several developments in fact coincided to produce a convulsion in New Zealand’s economy and political culture. The economy had been sliding into crisis since the mid 1970s. Growth was small; budget and current-account deficits were large; the overseas debt was formidable. Meanwhile, National Party prime minister Rob Muldoon had antagonized most sections of the electorate with his authoritarian style, and was heavily defeated in July 1984. Economic crisis coincided with the exhaustion of a political tradition, rather like what was to happen in Eastern Europe except that in this case the casualty was Keynesian economic management and the welfare state. In an atmosphere of economic and political crisis, the monetarist Right took control, claiming (with few demurring) that there was no alternative.
The most important factor was the severity of the country’s economic troubles. New Zealand in the 1980s was particularly vulnerable, in the main because it lacked the normal developed economy of other Western nations. The country is, in fact, something of a paradox: it has enjoyed a Western-style way of life and standard of living, but with an economic structure possessing definite colonial features. Indeed, one way of interpreting New Zealand’s recent history is that its colonial background has remorselessly asserted itself, as the country settles into a South American condition of economic decline and instability.
The term ‘colonial’ has to be used with reservations in the New Zealand context because most of the population are descended from colonizers, not the colonized. New Zealand was a frontier society in the nineteenth century. Imperial troops and colonial irregulars fought but failed to subdue completely the indigenous Maori. Native forests were felled and burned. The early economy relied on scavenger industries such as whaling, sealing, gold prospecting and gold and coal mining. Subsequently, sheep farming developed as the main rural economic activity. There was some manufacturing in the colony—baking, brewing, newspaper production, clothing—but no heavy industry other than mining.
Although New Zealand was originally colonized as a commercial enterprise—most of the early settlements being founded by companies whose purpose was to speculate in land—the state (the Crown in the colonial context) played a central role in developing an economic infrastructure. It was responsible for land acquisition from the Maori (through warfare and purchase), settlement, immigration, the building of railways and so on. It would be exaggerating to describe the colonization of New Zealand as an exercise in state capitalism; however, the state’s economic role was pivotal, its purpose being to facilitate the formation of a pastoral and commercial bourgeoisie…
Get a nice cool beer read and retain and pass on received wisdoms!
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